Film Festival Ephemera: Promotional Objects as Tools for Brand Identity and Self-Image

Abstract

While film festivals have been widely studied as transnational cultural infrastructures, there is less theoretical attention to their promotional materials and ephemera. This article fills that gap by analyzing festival merchandise not just as memorabilia but as a material infrastructure that generates economic value, shapes institutional identity, and fosters enduring cinephile communities. Drawing on film festival studies, material culture theory, branding, and consumer culture approaches, the article examines merchandising practices and visual identity systems at major international festivals like Cannes, Venice, Berlinale, Locarno, and Toronto, proposing a three-part analytical model that interprets promotional objects through their economic-financial, identity-strategic, and experiential-communicative functions. Findings indicate that promotional goods operate as hybrid cultural assets. Economically, they support revenue diversification and brand extension within volatile funding environments. Strategically, interpreted through Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism (2012), chromatic palettes, typographic systems and recurring symbols function as brand-identity stabilisers linking institutional culture and audience self-image. Experientially, drawing on Pine and Gilmore (1999) and Schmitt (1999), festival ephemera activate sensory, affective and relational processes that translate event temporality into lasting practices of recognition and affiliation. Situated within the domain of cinephemera, these artefacts emerge as material infrastructures of memory, distinction and cultural retention, demonstrating how film festival ephemera contributes to institutional coherence and the consolidation of transnational cinephile communities.